Iron lich

Iron liches are enemies in Heretic. Despite their names, iron liches are not the typical skeleton-like foes in robes to which others may be accustomed. They are instead giant, helmet-wearing skulls made of iron. Iron liches have the ability to cast three different kinds of elemental spells, all of which can inflict multiple hits:
 * 1) A wall of fire which spreads out vertically. These flames are affected by the push of wind.
 * 2) An ice ball which splits into eight shards when it hits a target or a wall. The main ball passes harmlessly through ghosts but its shards do not.
 * 3) A tornado which relentlessly chases and throws players into the air if they get too close to it. The tornado cannot home in on targets that have the ghost power, including players using a Shadowsphere.

Iron liches are first encountered at the end of the first episode of Heretic: City of the Damned. They will appear as normal or sub-boss enemies in later levels (beginning in a secret area of The Lava Pits), and a large group of iron liches guards the exit in the last level of The Ossuary, the fourth episode of Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders.

Tactical analysis
The iron lich cannot be transformed by the Morph Ovum, nor immediately killed with a firemace under the influence of the Tome of Power. Despite what their appearance might suggest, they are incapable of flight. With their extremely slow speed and relatively large size, the weapon of choice to kill them is the Phoenix Rod, which can dispatch a lone iron lich from a safe distance with five or fewer shots. In addition, the rod's splash damage enables it to take out a group of iron liches with considerably less than five shots per lich. Note that iron liches take half damage from the powered up Dragon Claw, though not from the rippers it shoots out. Each iron lich possesses 700 hit points.

The shadowsphere has increased utility when facing an iron lich: it both prevents the tornado attack from homing in and grants a little extra protection against direct hits by the ice clusterbombs.

When killed, they have a ~33% chance to drop a Claw Orb and a ~20% chance to drop a Morph Ovum.

Data

 * 1) These tables assume that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, impact animations, backfire checks, and smoke trails are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
 * 2) Hardcoded exception to infighting negates damage (excepting indirect damage caused by exploding puff pods).

Appearance statistics
In the IWADs the iron lich is first encountered on these maps per skill level:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of iron liches per skill level:

Trivia

 * In the original release of Heretic, the instant kill power of the tomed firemace worked on iron liches. This was apparently unintentional and changed in version 1.2 of the game.
 * The word lich is a term in fantasy literature which can describe any undead creature, but is particularly often used for still-intelligent undead spellcasters, as opposed to mindless zombies. A lich is often the result of a willful transformation undertaken by a wizard or warlock, through necromancy, in search of eternal life.
 * The "Scream" ambient sound uses parts of the alert and active sounds of the iron lich. This can give the player the feeling that the iron lich is somewhere nearby, even on levels where it is not present at all.